Alberto de Belaunde, a former Peruvian congressman and lawyer, has published his first work of fiction, a collection of 13 short stories titled Todo queda en familia, released by the independent Lima publisher Pesopluma.
The book draws on humor, everyday tragedy, and existential questioning. While the collection shows moments of narrative maturity uncommon in debut fiction, the interviewer at La República noted it also exhibits some of the narrative insecurity typical of first publications.
De Belaunde said that behind every great reader there is a clandestine writer who scribbles things down in notebooks but never takes the step of going public. He said reading had accompanied him throughout his life and that he had long seen writing as a side activity, something that entertained him and that he pursued through workshops.
The pandemic changed that. He enrolled in a virtual workshop with writer Katya Adaui and began reflecting seriously on writing with publication as a goal. He said the pandemic was a hard period for everyone but that it allowed him to look at writing in a new way.
Speaking about his characters, de Belaunde said he only recognised their fragility once the book was already in print. He described this quality not as weakness but as a prior state that allows characters to approach wonder and rediscover things. Stories such as “Acto de magia” and “La mudanza” exhibit this condition, while “La reina del Atlantis” follows trans women in central Lima who continue dreaming of something better despite very difficult circumstances, showing characters who confront fragility and push past it.
De Belaunde said one of the things he criticises as a reader is that contemporary Peruvian literature sometimes stays only at the level of language and artifice and forgets the story itself. He said he considers himself a storyteller rather than a writer of language, and that from the outset he regarded language as an instrument for narrating a story, not as an end in itself.
As a public figure entering the literary world, he said he had felt received in an open and comfortable space. He credited publishing with Pesopluma, a house known for curating its catalog carefully, as possibly helping him navigate whatever prejudices exist toward authors arriving from fields outside literature.
He spoke about the value of ambiguity and silence in fiction, calling them fertile ground for enriching a story. He contrasted the literary mode with his earlier writing as a columnist and as a lawyer, occupations that demanded the greatest possible clarity. In fiction, he said, it is worth far more for the reader to discover on their own that a character is unhappy than for a narrator to simply announce it, because discovery generates empathy in a way that plain statement cannot.
The book recently appeared at the Furia del Libro fair in Chile, where de Belaunde said readers identified with his characters even when they did not understand some expressions specific to Lima speech.
Todo queda en familia is available in bookstores and on digital platforms at a price of 55 soles.
